Audiences used to Colin Firth’s swoonsome Darcy roles have a shock in store. Where the Truth Lies, by Atom Egoyan, features him as a 1950s club performer called Vince, a pill-popping sleazeball with a violent streak. If you’re hoping to see a wet shirt clinging to his torso, the nearest you’ll get is when he’s bathed in sweat, giving someone a psychotic kicking in the wings, while his wacky but equally sinister partner Lanny (Kevin Bacon) strums an ukulele on stage in Cabaret-style ironic counterpoint.
In their tuxedos and dickie-bows, the boys clown around in front of a band, playing big hotels in the United States, doing songs and knockabout routines and ruthlessly womanising after the show. Their characters are evidently derived from Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and the cheesy duo are shown performing in the kind of sucrose charity telethon for which Lewis became notorious.
On the night of their greatest triumph — a 39-hour TV event in which a little girl thanks the boys for apparently curing her polio with their showbiz warmth — a dead body turns up in their hotel suite. The pair are cleared by the police but split up afterwards and refuse to explain further.
The little girl they ”save” grows up to be a journalist who goes on the trail of this scandal decades later. She is Karen O’Connor, played by a very young-looking Alison Lohman, so young-looking that she appears as herself in a semi-fantasised sequence showing her as an infant on stage with the big-hearted stars.
It all has rich potential for suspense, for drama, for comedy, for tragedy, for historical colour, for just about everything. Yet, in the most perplexing way, Egoyan’s movie doesn’t properly deliver on any of these. It is muddled, over-wrought, and somehow too cerebral and fastidious to tell the story straight.
Confusingly, Karen is trying to ghost Vince’s autobiography while receiving mysteriously sent chapters from Lanny’s self-penned tome, and almost all the action appears via some kind of flashback or indirect narrative device. Most baffling of all, when the adult Karen finally reveals to Vince her childhood connection to him and his ex-partner, he hardly reacts. Egoyan also appears to overlook its dramatic importance.
Bacon and Firth give interesting and watchable performances, both as 1950s smoothies and 1970s has-beens, their sleek grooming degenerating into tatty sideburns and cravats. But the period detail seems mannered and imitative, and the stars resemble very competent actors impersonating club comedians; they look too slim and handsome for the job and it’s hard to believe that these guys are tough enough to have faced down live cabaret audiences year in, year out.
Mychael Danna’s brooding and insistent musical score certainly impresses on you the movie’s aspirations to Hitchcockian status, but there’s no real tension, no clear and present danger.
A novel by British author Rupert Holmes is the source; I haven’t read it. Though I am an evangelist for Ted Heller’s 2003 novel Funnymen, a fictionalisation of Martin and Lewis that is ripe for film treatment.
As for this film’s part in Egoyan’s career, it has something of the recessive, story-within-a-story structure of his last picture, Ararat, though it is far less high-minded and more commercial, with steamy sex scenes that can’t do the box office any harm. There are diverting moments, but it adds up to nothing in particular. The question is not so much where the truth lies, but why we should care in the first place. — Â